The History of Love

A Novel

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.

Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book. . . . Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of “extraordinary depth and beauty” (Newsday).

Book Details

Paperback

May 2006

ISBN 978-0-393-32862-2

5.5 × 8.3 in
/ 272 pages

Sales Territory: Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Other Formats

Awards

Endorsements & Reviews

“

Vertiginously exciting.... Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps ​The History of Love ​moving (and keeps its reader off balance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides.... Even at their most oddball, these flourishes reflect the deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft.

” — Janet Maslin, New York Times

“

The novel's achievement is precisely this: to have made a new fiction—alternately delightful and hilarious and deeply affecting.

” — Claire Messud, LA Weekly

“At least as heartbreaking as it is hilarious.” — Washington Post

“

Krauss writes like an angel.

” — Guardian

“One of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one’s breath away.” — Spectator

“It’s the sort of book that makes life bearable after all.” — Miami Herald

“

Nicole Krauss's Leo Gursky is all voice—frisky, aching, jittery, stunning, heart-rending, irresistible. There's nothing like his voice, nor will there ever be. A cross between I.B. Singer and Woody Allen, Kafka and Leopold Bloom, [it] doesn't just work its way into the pantheon of American voices: it literally walks straight up to them and asks them to move over—or else it will haunt their living days and nights. And it does just that.

” — Andre Aciman

“A significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best. Emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense.” — New York